These
are perilous times. Those who lived through the dark days of the
McCarthy period regretfully underscore the far greater dangers
confronting us all today following the Bush administration’s
declaration of a perpetual "war on terror."Sadly, long before 9/11, the conservative political climate
brought on by the 80s had already succeeded in diminishing the capacity
of leftist intellectuals to imagine the possible. This fear of ideas
that a voluntary curtailment of the imagination suggests prompted
long-time activist and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz to draw a parallel
with McCarthyism when, in contrast, such fears were justifiable. That
was two years ago.Now the
eagle has bared its talons.In
response, youthful anti-war, anti-globalization activists, suspiciously
untutored in antifoundationalism and the profundities of indeterminacy,
are out in the streets.One
can only hope that scholars engaged in what these days passes for
leftist thinking will follow suit and rise to the challenge.

For
the time being, regressive currents have caused paradoxes of all sorts
to proliferate. What are we to make of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's
denial of the fact that the United States is the world's reigning
superpower and their argument that globalization must not be
simplistically viewed as univocal and unified (2000)? Juxtapose this
with economist Joseph E. Stiglitz' censure of his former employer, the
World Bank, in which he validates anti-globalization activists'
allegation that structural adjustment programs have merely served to
further impoverish the poor of the world today (2002). Or with patrician
financier George Soros (2002) who writes that year after year the flow
of money has been from the poor nations to the rich, and advises that
the process be halted.And
how are we to take historian Kristin Hoganson's contention (1998) that
the United States' 1898 adventure in the Philippines was driven by the
"problem of male degeneracy"?Is it to stamp out incipient effeminacy that U.S. troops are now
patrolling its former colony?And is the reclamation of manliness why Colin Powell,
speaking for the U.S. State Department, has designated the New People's
Army, led by the Communist Party of the Philippines, a "terrorist
organization"?How
about the postmodern/postcolonial preoccupation with
"difference" and"intersectionality,"
along with the valorization of "interstitial spaces" as the
most favorable site for radical positioning?Does not Eve Ensler's border-crossing, widely translated
"Vagina Monologues" deftly reassert U.S. cultural hegemony by
rushing to save Afghan women from their repressive menfolk (poor
benighted sisters), while outfitting vaginas with Louis Vuitton boots,
Birkin bag, and Lolita Lempicke perfume?

What
confusion is being sown at the very moment when it is clarity that we
most need! Something is awry when it is rock star Bono and the Secretary
of Treasury, not radical intellectuals, whom we observe publicly
bemoaning Third World plight like indebtedness and lack of safe water.Yet it is probably a good guess that, along with the noblesse
oblige of Stiglitz and Soros, such cooptational moves by the bourgeoisie
are designed to preempt the emergence of a new social movement from
which leftist academics have so far abstained.

To
be sure, not all Marxists in the academy have yielded to the postmodern
turn of the 80s and abandoned the socialist project.But debates among Marxists about the meaning of
globalization—whether it is a mere continuation of the old or whether
it represents an epochal shift, a distinct break from the past, for
example— have been confined to very limited circles.Ellen Meiksins Wood (1998) rejects the notion of an epochal shift
and views as erroneous the assumption that the forces of production are
determinant and that the global reach of giant corporations means a
diminished nation-state and a fragmented working class.While pointing to the disintegrative effects that "totalization"
may likely produce on capital (she nixes the use of
"globalization" because it hides the contradictions inherent
in capitalist accumulation and indicates the withdrawal of the state
from regulatory functions), she insists on both the possibility and
urgency of recuperating the socialist project.Agreeing with Meiksins Wood's exhortations to organize
opposition to capital, David Harvey (2000) attributes the promotion of
"globalization" as a concept to the financial press which
coined it to explain the financial deregulation of the early 70s.He laments the Western left's (himself included) concession to
its adoption in place of politically charged words used
previously—"colonialism,” "neocolonialism," and
"imperialism."Perhaps
less insistent than Meiksins Wood that quantitative rather than
qualitative change (i.e., a fundamental change in the mode of
production) has occurred, he proposes the substitution of "uneven
geographical development" for "globalization" as a
framework better able to locate spaces of hope within which progressives
might mount opposition.

Going
further than either Harvey or Meiksins Wood, James Petras (2000)
proclaims globalization to be nothing more than a code word for U.S.
imperialism, and proceeds to provide evidence for this assertion.He demolishes the myth of an interdependent, bi-polar or
tri-polar "global village"—dismissing the "Asian
Miracles" as a mirage—by documenting what he presents as the
unquestionable economic supremacy of the United States.He cites 1998 as the year in which the dominance of the United
States was established, furnishing the following information, among
others: the U.S. holds 244 of the 500 biggest companies in the world,
Japan 46, Germany 23; of the 25 largest firms whose capitalization
exceeds $86 billion, over 70% are U.S., 26% European, and 4% Japanese;
of the top 100 companies, 61% are U.S., 33% European, 2% Japanese.Thus, control of the global economy by transnationals is, in
effect, tantamount to control by the United States.

Needless
to say, economic domination by the United States has been known for
decades by most of the world's peoples.They've felt it in their blood and bones.That they've also viewed the United States today as the most
dangerous threat to world peace is only now reaching the consciousness
of citizens of this country.Indian
novelist Arundhati Roy, lambasting the bombing of Afghanistan (when food
packages were dropped) in retaliation for the attacks in New York,
Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon, wrote searingly of US "brutality
smeared in peanut butter" (2001).More recently, Kenyan development worker E.D. Mathew (2002)
writes of the imminent war on Iraq: "But the horror of horrors is
the fact that there is feeble public opinion around major international
issues in the United States." It apparently takes Third World
nationals to speak truth to power.For reading cultural studies publications these days can be a
deeply alienating experience.It
is as if the stark realities of globalization have been carefully
concealed from scholars whose writings continue to be replete with
fantasies of the demise of the nation-state, seamlessness,
border-crossing, fragmentation, multiplicity, heterogeneous and
fluctuating identities.

Feminists,
on the other hand, ruefully remark on their exclusion from discussions
of globalization.I think
one can safely assume that it is not discussions about the US imperium
that feminists are raring to join, given that Marxists are a negligible
number in the U.S. and that U.S. feminism is nothing if not postmodern.For example, the editorial in a Feminist Review (a UK-based, formerly Marxist-feminist publication)
issue on women and globalization complains that male intellectuals have
monopolized the construction of macro analyses of globalization in spite
of women's participation in anti-globalization movements internationally
(Brah et al 2002).The
editors seem not to have noticed the state of disconnect characterizing
theory and practice in the North.Nor
do they hesitate to claim credit for the active role that women in the
South have taken in anti-globalization efforts.Moreover, the issue itself, while indeed tackling the topic of
Third World female diaspora, has little to offer that truly illuminates,
simply reiterating as it does the idea of "positionality" and
the banal "intersections" formula—of race, class, and
gender, sexuality, etc.—currently a staple in women's studies courses.In a more activist mode, Charlotte Bunch (2002) raises an
urgent call for US women to oppose George W. Bush' call to war, bringing
to notice the puzzlement of women elsewhere over US feminism's utter
lack of influence on the country's foreign policy.

The
fact is, there is no viable U.S. women's movement to speak of.Marxist feminists have wondered about its disappearance beginning
in the early 80s, but public expression of this has been resisted
(Epstein 2001).It is the
dissolution of the progressive movement in general and the
institutionalization of feminism in particular that have divested the
latter of both urgency and substance.If feminist theory has surrendered to postmodernism and
culturalism, in the process becoming vacuous, jargon-laden and
ineffectual, it is because there has been no collective practice upon
which to bring theory to bear.This,
only a mass movement can supply.Nor
is there a place to test the validity of theories spun in the
sequestered cranny of the university.In such a context, it is to be expected that feminist theoretical
production would be undertaken chiefly for professional career purposes,
even as a pretext of "transformation" might still be implied
as its goal.It should be
no surprise when feminists whose focus is on globalization can construct
airy concepts like "transnationalism" and
"transmigration" to refer to the flow of people from the South
to the North, effectively flattening international relations of power
and obfuscating the racialization(i.e.,
exclusion from the mainstream) and class status of the migrants involved
(Basch, et al 1994; Kaplan et al 1999).

In
spite of this main trend, the start of the 90s witnessed the publication
of works that began to interrogate the progressive claims of postmodern
feminism, clearly doing so against the current.Barbara Epstein (1995) saw postmodernism as a dead end for
feminism, pointing to the ways in which its focus on difference and the
pursuit of anti-essentialism served to inhibit its radical potential.Sylvia Walby (1992 ) wrote that the fragmentation of identities
had gone too far, and Carole Stabile (1995) decried the middle-class
character of feminism and its confinement to educational institutions.Joanne Naiman argued that "left feminism" had strayed
off the mark of social change as a consequence of what Ellen Meiksins
Wood called a "retreat from class," and urged a return to
Marxism (1996).But the most thorough study, review, and critique of the
major theories that inform feminist theoretical production is that of
Teresa Ebert (1996) whose unequivocal emphasis on class and the social
relations of production lifts the cover off their complicity, in one way
or another, with the existing order.All of these writers are among the minority who have sought to
demonstrate that underlying the shift to postmodernism and discursive
analysis is the totally mistaken perception that Marxism is economist,
determinist and, surely to the delight of those in power, outdated and
irrelevant; that is, that postmodernism is anti-Marxism.Overall, feminists who have bravely persisted in thinking within
a Marxist conceptual frame reveal the conservative bias in analyses that
valorize discourse over historical materialism, consumption over
production, and culture over production relations.Instead, they call for a recuperation of a class analysis.

Those
who write along the lines of "transculture," which is to say
culture perceived inaesthetic
terms, are so detached from the dirt and grime of the workaday world
that they can perhaps be forgiven for their sometimes vapid, if elegant,
commentaries.But it is
difficult to be generous with feminists doing research on migrant
labor—domestic workers, mail-order brides, or prostitutes ("sex
workers" in postmodern-speak)— when they shirk the responsibility
of telling us what the deal is.Feminists writing about the subject normally come face to
face with distinctly class-marked Third World actors and compile a
remarkable wealth of empirical data to draw conclusions from.Moreover, because migrant labor lies at the very heart of
globalization processes, feminist researchers are in an excellent
position to query pressing inequities in North/South relations.Yet they do not.Tangible
evidence of migrant workers' heightened role in the economic survival of
their countries is provided by the remittances they provide.The IMF put worldwide remittances at $2 billion in 1970; this
figure climbed to $73 billion in the year 2000, according to the
International Labor Organization (Diamond 2001).I will turn shortly to a sample of studies of Filipino migrant
workers, but let me first give a brief overview of the phenomenon.

While
the enlistment of migrant labor has been integral to the history of
capitalist development, with free trade, deregulation, and neoliberalism
as globalization's guideposts, the diasporic flow of migrant women from
peripheral formations to more affluent countries is today quite
unprecedented.Our
comprehension of the situation of Filipino overseas contract workers (OCWs)
would be hugely aided by Petras' unflinching use of "U.S.
imperialism" instead of "globalization" or even of
"global capitalism."

Taken
over from Spain and colonized for 50 years by the United States, the
Philippines today maintains relations with the U.S. that can only be
accurately defined as neocolonial. In this regard military arrangements
bear mention, for economic domination in tandem with military might are
intended to banish dreams of resistance and revolution.The U.S. bases, Clark and Subic, closed down in 1992 in the face
of official nationalist calls for their dismantling, but a new
agreement, the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), was ratified in 1999
against massive public protests.Allowing the U.S. military 22 entry points in the country,
the VFA gives the latter more freedom than before.Today US forces are stationed in the southern island of Mindanao
purportedly in pursuit of a Muslim group that has been revealed to have
only a tenuous connection to Al Qaeda.A Mutual Logistics and Service Agreement is being devised to
permit the US to bring equipment and supplies for easy deployment of
troops without worry over sovereignty trespass. Addressing an
international solidarity forum in Manila recently, Lawrence University
professor Kathryn Poethig referred to such brazen maneuvers as impelled
by "a racist nationalist imperialism" (2002).As previously mentioned, Colin Powell recently declared the New
People's Army a "terrorist" organization.True to her standing as neocolonial puppet, President Gloria M.
Arroyo obediently echoed the pronouncement.

An
export-oriented production and the establishment of free-trade zones
evolved with the dictator Ferdinand Marcos under the direction of the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank (IMF/WB), instruments of
empire that impose "structural adjustment programs."This export-led model of development subsequently became linked
with the exportation of human labor that, in the 1990s, began to assume
a predominantly female character.In
the main, this export of women has taken the form of mail-order marriage
contracts, "entertainment," and domestic work.Compliance with IMF/WB dictates by Presidents Aquino, Ramos,
Estrada, and now Arroyo have simply perpetuated, if not exacerbated, the
distorted economic program inaugurated by Marcos.

Today
the deployment of women overseas is a phenomenon in which the
Philippines can claim "number one" status.Indeed, OCWs have become a normal feature of the socioeconomic
landscape.Fully 10% of the
population of82 million is
overseas; 70% of OCWs are women, large numbers serving as domestic
workers for families in 162 countries.These women have been lauded by Presidents Aquino and Ramos as
"the country's new heroines," and by Ramos as "the
Philippines' contribution to other countries' development."Without the remittances these workers send home, $7 billion in
2000, the government would not have managed its debt-service payments to
financial lending agencies.It
is a widely acknowledged fact in the Philippines that the survival of
the economy has been made possible by the remittances of OCWs, which
represent the largest source of foreign exchange.Even ruling out such mishaps as the execution in Singapore of
Flor Contemplacion in 1995; the death sentence on 16-year-old Sarah
Balabagan later that year in the Middle East; and the arrival in Manila
every day of an average of four dead OCWs, the mere practice of shipping
out labor in such volume (800,000 in 2001) is mind-boggling.In the midst of talk about an impending war on Iraq, the 1.5
million migrant workers in the Gulf States have been advised by the
Philippine government to "stay put."

So
how are feminist scholars handling this information? In Maid
to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers (1997), Nicole
Constable draws attention to the predicament of 150,000 "guest
workers" in the then newly reunified Chinese territory.Her account is rich and dense with the minutiae of the maids'
day-to-day struggles in the hands of Chinese employers who are often
prone to meting out harsh, racialized treatment. Drawing on Michel
Foucault's disciplinary regimes, Constable outlines the ways in which
various institutions (employment agencies, state policy, employers)
manage, regulate, and control the behavior of these women through the
deployment of a variety of disciplinary forms, physical and
psychological.To the
extent that she exposes the institutions profiting from the extraction
of Filipina domestics' surplus labor, she does a commendable job.However, this is not the task that she set out to undertake.Proof of this is that she allots but a few pages to the history
of labor migration in the Philippines, omitting any meaningful reference
to the country's colonial history or to its neocolonial status.

Although
Constable states that "Filipino migrant workers are the
Philippines' largest source of foreign exchange," this is not quite
the same as acknowledging that their remittances have fuelled
consumerism and kept the economy above water, common knowledge in the
country.Nor does the
author evince deep interest in probing the reasons for such a situation.Further, even though she describes the operations and instruments
of repressive institutions, she ultimately downplays their role.Finally (and from here springs the energy that unmistakably
drives her work), she trains the spotlight on the quotidian—the
everyday practices of "resistance" that she perceives domestic
helpers to engage in.Clarifying
her point of view, Constable declares: "To regard these women
simply as oppressed by those "with power" is to ignore the
subtler and more complex forms of power, discipline, and resistance in
their everyday lives" (202).

With
this in mind, Constable devotes the entire book to unravelling the
precise mechanisms employed by domestic helpers in myriad acts of
defiance and rebellion.The
result is a book that explains how those normally believed to be without
power are shown to be actually in possession of it.Demonstrations of this "power" range from the use of
subtle insider jokes, intelligible only to Filipino cohorts, to cajolery
and chicanery, and to confrontation and quitting work.Constable interprets as acts of protest ("in a Gandhian
sense") the Sunday gatherings of domestic workers in public spaces,
acknowledging that the women themselves may view it as no more than
their simple right to be there.On Sundays at fast-food restaurants, Filipinas relish the
reversed role of being served instead of serving, even as McDonald's and
other establishments "do a roaring business" off them.Constable cites one woman who protested poor service at
McDonalds’s by writing a letter to the newspaper, another by
requesting extra catsup and napkins.Admittedly, unlike factory workers who loudly raise voices to
protest, domestic workers "whisper admonitions to compatriots. .
.imploring them to work harder, to complain less, and to behave better.Their everyday forms of resistance are geared toward
surviving their situation with their sense of humanity intact"
(206).

The
author admits the discursive character of most of these acts of
resistance, herself doubting their efficacy in making changes either in
the conditions of work or in mitigating power relations.But she is determined to disprove the idea that women are passive
victims, a notion ostensibly stemming from systemic explanations of
gender subordination, although this is not made explicit.She accepts the possibility that deferential behavior may,
indeed, signify nothing more than accommodation; that, despite all this
resistance, relations between predominantly Chinese employers and
Filipina domestics have remained the same, and that domestic work
persists as a degrading and dehumanizing occupation.Nevertheless, in the final chapter, entitled "Pleasure and
Power," she concludes:

we
can begin to see how Filipina domestic workers derive pleasure, or at
least some satisfaction, from attempts to organize their work better
and maximize their productivity, to get along better with employers,
and to "professionalize" their image, even at the cost of
becoming ever more obedient and hardworking.Their work, after all, is what allows them to remain in Hong
Kong, a wealthy and cosmopolitan place that excites their imaginations
while extracting their labor (210).

In
this passage, Constable indubitably wants the reader to view Filipina
domestics as endowed with human agency—individual agency, more
precisely.Because she has allowed existing social relations to define
the parameters of her conceptual framework, she seems unperturbed by the
irony of seeing these women as deriving pleasure from maximizing their
productivity and performing in a more organized and
"professional" manner the very activity that solidifies their
exploitation.Blind to an
international division of labor that is inherently unequal, she can
speak of a seemingly neutral, depersonalized entity (a "wealthy and
cosmopolitan" Hong Kong) "that excites their imaginations
while extracting their labor" in the same breath— as though the
two notions were equally benign.Given
this stance, it is no surprise that one approving reviewer of
Constable's book prescribed it as useful reading for Chinese employers
of Filipina domestic helpers (Smart 1998).

Compared
to Constable, Rhacel Parrenas' articulation of the situation of Filipina
domestic workers as indicated by the title of her book, Servants
of Globalization, is quite straightforward: "Migrant
Filipina domestic workers are the global servants of late
capitalism" (2001, 243).From
this one would expect a lucid explanation of how they came to acquire
this rank in the world community.Instead,
we are handed something of a tautology: "The relegation of
developing countries as a source of secondary-tier transnational workers
perpetuates the status of these states as developing countries and
maintains the inequalities that cause the outmigration and social
decline of their educated workers" (250).The book, a comparison of domestic workers in Los Angeles and in
Rome, though liberally peppered with the vocabulary of the left, fails
to name the force or forces that cause this relegation.All the ingredients accounting for diaspora are present,
including colonialism (but tellingly, not imperialism), export-led
development, transnational corporatism, globalization of the market
economy, IMF/WB, global restructuring and so on, but these are put forth
in scattershot fashion and do not cohere to render a clear picture.Far from it.For
instance, on the same page that describes the relegation of the
Philippines as a source of "secondary-tier transnational
workers" (read: cheap migrant labor), it is also named as a
"winner" (the domestic helpers and their families being the
losers), along with the host countries, Italy and the United States.Such is the magic of "transnationalism," where racism
and immense power differentials are easily wiped out.

It
is true that the macrostructural is not, as Parrenas states at the
outset, the defining conceptual frame for her study.She specifies her perspective as an analysis of migration
"from the level of the subject" that will give the reader a
"sense of various fragmentations imposed by structural
processes" (252), thereby avoiding essentialism, the bugaboo of
postmodernists.In her view
this differs also from an institutional approach,that of households and social networks, in which the agency
of the subject still needs to be established.We can here immediately detect her theoretical kinship with
Constable.From here on we
can likewise predict with reasonable accuracy that Parrenas' project
will be to show how fragmented, multiply constituted subjects engage in
"everyday acts of resistance," now a standard motif in
feminist studies.

Comparing
and contrasting the experiences of these two groups of migrants,
Parrenas arrives at four themes which she labels their "key
dislocations": 1) partial citizenship, 2) pain of family
separation, 3) contradictory class mobility, and 4) non-belonging in the
migrant community.These
dislocations comprise the sites for the "immediate struggles"
in which migrant workers deploy their agency.This is how she sums up their resistance:

...the
actions of domestic workers involve the maintenance of inequalities,
particularly the system of global restructuring in which their
constitution as subjects is situated.For example, the construction of the Philippines as
"home" supports their stunted incorporation into the host
society and consequently their construction as "guests" in
receiving nations.With
the turn that they take against the pain of family separation,
commodification rules the transnational family, as relationships are
reduced to material goods.Capitalism
is thus heightened by the actions of migrant Filipina domestic workers
in regard to the dislocation imposed by the formation of the
transnational household. Capitalism is further reconstituted in the
relationships of domestic workers in the community with the emergence
of the hyperreality of making money in Rome and the reduction of the
basis of membership in the migrant community of Los Angeles to class.Finally, the mechanisms of control in domestic work as they are
neither eliminated nor reconstituted but instead only manipulated, are
consequently maintained (253).

Let
us parse this paragraph, filling in some of the blanks with information
from elsewhere in the text.In
response to "partial citizenship" (a semantic blunder, because
neither Italy nor the US grant migrants citizenship), the women
"resist" by continuing to envision the Philippines as home.By doing so they hinder their own assimilation into the host
society.To ease the pain
of family separation, particularly from their small children, they
resort to sending material goods as a substitute for their maternal
presence.By doing so they
commodify transnational family relations.In response to the injuries of downward mobility, they utilize a
few strategies: they imagine themselves returning home and hiring their
own domestics; use mystifications such as "like one of the
family" and maternalism to manipulate their employers; and in
relation to Latina and Black workers, perceive themselves to be the
superior "educated domestics."In response to their sense of non-belonging, in Rome (where
Filipino presence is fairly recent, official Filipino migration having
begun only in the 70s) they attempt to hasten their departure through
"capital accumulation" (translation: the practice of renting
out beds and lending money to compatriots).In Los Angeles where Filipinos are an established immigrant
community, sharp class divisions trigger "anomie" (read:
distress over class injuries) in migrant domestic workers who are
objects of condescension by the professional class.In response they turn to each other for solidarity, thus
cementing their outsider status.

In
short, although wishing to valorize domestic workers as empowered
agents, Parrenas herself concludes that their acts of resistance serve
only to perpetuate their subordination.Not only that.They
even heighten capitalist relations, according to her, when they engage
in "microcapitalist" ventures where their "primary
goal" is one of "capital accumulation." Forget for a
moment the new definitions of capitalist relations and capital
accumulation.But note how
her conclusions that derive directly from her conceptual lens conjure
the unfortunate image of "lifting a rock only to drop it on one's
feet" and, furthermore, resonate with the conservative tactic of
blaming the victim, neither of which, one must grant, she can possibly
intend.

Both
Constable and Parrenas make a mockery of the plight of Filipina domestic
workers by fetishising their pragmatic "make-do" skills.Their interest in the quotidian comes out as petty and
patronizing under scrutiny.Purposely
shunning an explanatory framework that could raise necessary questions
about an international division of labor stemming directly from U.S.
control of the Philippine polity via the IMF/WB, they turn to a
decontextualized micropolitics, ultimately defeating their stated aim.Unlike Constable, Parrenas has amassed data on the global
political economy that she supplies generously throughout and reports
matter-of-factly.Here's an
example: "...they [export-based nations] also export bodies of
their citizens to induce foreign currency into their economies,"
then proceeds to cite figures disclosing how "the number of bodies
annually exported has increased steadily..." (51) But unanchored to
a critique of imperialism, this becomes no more than a neutered
statement of fact that, moreover, stands removed from and has no bearing
on her study of migrant women.These
women are, without a doubt, racialized, class-defined subjects.Yet race and class are conspicuously absent from the analysis,
"resistance" having been substituted for class struggle.In this connection, are we seriously urged to interpret as an
"act of resistance" the supposed "goal of capital
accumulation" that the researcher has put upon her hapless objects
of study?

The
retreat from anything symptomatic of a class-informed analysis that
underlies relations between dependent nations and powerful states like
the United States is a crucial lack that makes studies like Parrenas'
and Constable's lose their radical potential.In fact, poverty itself is discounted as a causal factor in
migration.Constable
dismisses the importance of class by declaring that many of the Filipina
domestics in Hong Kong do not hail from the poorest or least educated
sector in Philippine society.Interestingly
enough, Arlie Hochschild strikes the same chord in an article in which
she proposes viewing the flow of migration from the South to the North
as a "global care chain" or, better yet, the
"globalization of love" (2000). Beginning from the peasant
woman in the Philippines paid a miserly sum to look after the children
of the domestic helper now in Beverly Hills caring for offspring not her
own, the chain ends with the affluent white woman whose on-the-job
duties as a female include that of creating a caring corporate climate.Using some of Parrenas' data (the prerogative of a senior
professor), Hochschild maintains that some of the women who were
interviewed spoke not of escaping poverty but domestic violence.And even if poverty generated by underdevelopment is the problem,
she continues, immigration scholars have demonstrated that attempts at
transforming these societies would merely have the effect of raising
expectations, initially increasing rather than decreasing migration.So much for feminism's social change agenda.

There
is hope, however.Two
empirical studies of an entirely different character stand out as
significant contributions to progressive thinking and practice.The first is by Grace Chang (Disposable
Domestics 2000), who utilizes an anti-imperialist gendered
perspective to demonstrate how U.S. immigration and welfare policies
connive to facilitate the exploitation of the labor of Latina and
Filipina domestics in California, while curtailing much-needed support
for biological and social reproduction.The cheap labor of migrant women is welcomed by middle- and
upper-class women who are freed from household and caregiving duties to
pursue careers.Although
she documents the vulnerability of these women who cook, clean, and
provide care, nothing in the book suggests their passive victimization;
instead, they are shown participating in grassroots organizations
working toward collective solutions to their problems.The second book is Bridget Anderson'sDoing the Dirty Work?,
to which Iwill now turn.

Anderson
deploys historical materialism to frame her empirical research into the
living and working conditions of migrant women in five European cities
(Athens, Barcelona, Bologna, Berlin, and Paris) and has produced an
analysis that is at once exhaustive, complex, and pointed.Zeroing in on the conditions under which migrant workers toil in
private households, she summons for comparison the practice of slavery,
which the United Nations defines thus: "any institution or practice
which, by restricting the freedom of the individual, is susceptible of
causing severe hardship and serious deprivation of liberty" (quoted
in her earlier work, Britain's
Secret Slaves 1993: 11).She
maintains that the existence of a contract by no means negates slavery,
a contention amply supported by her subjects' narration of their often
horrid experiences, and given immigration policy requiring that a
domestic's visa be linked to a specified employer.Overall her book may be read as evidence that "...conquest
in global economic terms makes contemporary legal slaves of the poor of
the Third World, giving the middle class of the First World
materialistic forms of power over them" (149).She refers to Aristotle's distinction between
"legal" and "natural" slaves, arguing that it is
their race and gender that naturalize these migrant workers'
subjugation—their presumed closeness to nature suiting them for the
occupation—while citizenship (lack thereof) and nationality furnish
the legal justification.Once
the export of Third World domestic labor—Filipino, Dominican,
Ethiopian, and Peruvian, among others in her sample—is understood in
this way, the ground is laid for her inquiry into the migrant
worker/employer relationship.

Anderson
asks the critical question, exactly what is being bought by the
employer/mistress when she hires a racialized migrant domestic? Her
answer is that it is not labor power, but the very self, the personhood
of the worker, that is transformed into a commodity.What the employer pays for is the "power to command"
not merely labor power, but the whole person.Employers often specify what kind of person they want to hire, as
in: one who is affectionate, good with children or old people, who
doesn't have strong body odor, etc. Anderson charges that it is this
authority over the person of the racialized, inferior Other that enables
a mistress to order her domestic to clean the floor three times a day
with a toothbrush, to call her "dog" or "donkey," or
to require her to stand in the same position all day.The domestic is herself the means of production, what she
produces being "...the physical, cultural and ideological
reproduction of human beings" (113).Her role is that of status-giver, "to give honor through
dishonor" (164) in a script in which the mistress must carefully
construct as part of her daily routine a relationship of pronounced
asymmetry.The two
positions, then, are in basic conflict: the employer, wishing to extract
the most labor for the least sum, is interested in devaluing housework,
while the domestic, in order to survive, must work against her own
interests.Liberated from the drudgery of housework, the mistress
becomes like a man who can engage in production unhampered by the
physical labor of social reproduction, while continuing to enjoy the
emotional aspects of mothering.For
the migrant, it is as family provider that she is engaged in domestic
work, but her experience of it as a person who is at the same time a
non-person (because she is commodified) cannot but be exploitative.To fulfill her maternal role, she is reduced to showing care
through impersonal remittances, the fruits of her hard labor (118).(Recall Parrenas' notion of "commodified transnational
families.") This objective relationship obtains, the personal
characteristics of the individuals who happen to occupy the positions
notwithstanding.

Anderson's
placement of social reproduction at the center of her analysis allows
her to examine the ways in which class, gender, race, and nation are
tightly interwoven into the mistress/domestic relationship.It is European women's responsibilities in the private sphere
of reproduction that hinder their full participation as citizens in the
way that men can and do.But
Anderson notes that it is also this very role that permits their formal
incorporation into society.Both
in Britain and France the argument was that the unremunerated work of
married women enabled their husbands to do paid work (187).Although qualitatively different, women's work is vital to the
social order, perhaps the most important component of reproductive labor
being the biological reproduction of the race.Anderson connects the latter with the historical development of
nation-states where membership in the community was determined by race,
a circumscription that is constantly being negotiated.It is in this racialized setting that European women's
positioning as citizens acquires significance, and it is here, too, that
domestic workers play their major role: "The fact that they are
migrants is important: in order to participate likemen women must have workers
who will provide the same flexibility as wives, in particular working
long hours and combining caring and domestic chores" (190, italics
in the original).Anderson
observes further that the duty of "a woman with good European
genes" is to ensure their biological reproduction in the next
generation (190).But
bearing children is not enough.The
European woman is additionally entrusted with the inculcation of morals
and values in her offspring, an obligation she can now fulfill minus the
burden of their physical care.Care
as labor is the domestic's assignment, the experience of care as
emotion, the employer's privilege.Suddenly Hochschild's "global care chain," now a phrase
incorporated into feminist parlance, appears trivial, off-course, and
diversionary.

As
a long-standing member of Kalayaan (Tagalog for "freedom"), a
UK-based organization of migrant workers, Anderson has worked in the
areas of immigration and citizenship where she believes some change is
possible.Her advice to
organizers of live-in migrant domestics clearly shows her commitment to
struggle even as she recognizes the limits inherent in the conditions of
their labor: "I would...put forward for the consideration of
workers and activists that live-in domestic work, for all the benefits
it apparently offers the worker, binds her into a relation of status and
dependence mediated by racism" (196).Curiously, her book has been cited but not reviewed.Like her, Grace Chang is an immigrants' and workers' rights
advocate. Chang credits the Third World women she met at the Beijing
conference in 1995 for the global political economy turn in her
thinking.The publication
of these books heralds a return to Marxism at a moment when historical
events demand nothing less.Both
studies portend a hopeful new direction for a feminism finely in tune
with the anti-war, anti-globalization clamor in the streets that we are
hearing today.When
ruling-class men like Ted Kennedy can speak openly of "twenty-first
century American imperialism" (Featherstone 2002: 5), we ought to
be well warned that it's long past time to debunk culturalism and all
foolish notions of a benevolent "Empire."